Scott A. Mori (1941-2020)

Profile

Dr. Scott A. Mori, who spent the vast majority of his long and distinguished career at The New York Botanical Garden, passed away in August 2020. The following summary of his research, which he provided for this profile, indicates the broad range of his scientific pursuits and accomplishments.

Dr. Scott Mori’s research on flowering plants focused on the taxonomy and ecology of trees of the lowland New World tropics. Dr. Mori was especially interested in co-evolution between plants and their pollinators and seed dispersers. In order to investigate these relationships, Mori pursued taxonomic research on the Brazil nut family (Lecythidaceae) for which his colleague Iain Prance and he have completed a Flora Neotropica monograph. In addition, Mori selected geographic areas of high species diversity of the Brazil nut family for detailed study of its ecological relationships. For example, his colleagues and he published the results of a study of the 27 species of the family found in central French Guiana and another study of the 39 species of Lecythidaceae found in a 100-hectare central Amazonian plot. This research gave Mori a better understanding of the evolution of the family as well as permitted him to make specific recommendations for the conservation of lowland, neotropical trees. One Dr. Mori’s most important later projects was an NSF Opportunities for Promoting Understanding Through Synthesis grant which allowed him and his colleagues to synthesize what they learned about the Brazil nut family in an electronic monograph called The Lecythidaceae Pages (see link in right hand panel).

With the participation of many other botanists, Dr. Mori organized and carried through to publication the Guide to the Vascular Plants of Central French Guiana. This flora was done in collaboration with the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD), one of the organizations responsible for research in France’s overseas departments. The book is designed to allow botanists as well as non-botanists to determine the names of plants in this, one of the last wilderness areas of the world. In collaboration with French scientists associated with IRD and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS, Mori also compiled e-Floras for the Nouragues Nature Park and elsewhere in French Guiana.

With his wife, Carol Gracie, Mori prepared an electronic checklist of the flowering plants of the Caribbean island of Saba in the Netherlands Antilles and Reinaldo Aguilar, Xavier Cornejo, and Mori did an e-flora of the Osa Peninsula of Costa Rica.

One of Mori’s books, entitled Tropical Plant Collection: From the Field to the Internet, was designed to pass on what he learned as a botanist in order to make it easier and safer for others to carry out biological research in the tropics.